London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

It’s far rarer than one might think to see a good-natured play, written by a palpably warm-hearted playwright, peopled with characters whose lives aren’t brimming over with big-town angst.

Tom Wells, whose cherishable low-fi comedy The Kitchen Sink (2011) was rightly heaped with praise and awards, is one such writer, which makes it a treat to see what he has come up with next. Enjoyable as Jumpers for Goalposts is, though, line by line and scene by scene, overall it suffers from a serious lack of any credible dramatic tension.

Every storyline ends exactly as we guess it will within the opening few minutes of James Grieve’s amiable production for new writing company Paines Plough. We’re in Hull, in the scruffy changing room used by a hapless team of friends who play for Barely Athletic, a five-a-side football team in the Gay and Lesbian Sunday League.

If things are looking grim on the pitch, they’re in a tailspin off it. Viv (Vivienne Gibbs) is blanking out her sister’s death via ferocious reading of coaching manuals; Danny (Jamie Samuel) likes shy Luke (Philip Duguid-McQuillan) but has a dark medical secret and Geoff (Andy Rush, who has fun with the sparkiest character) won’t take off the woolly hat he wears to hide the scars of a “gay-bashing”.

There’s sensitive handling of gay romance from Wells, even if Danny and Luke are almost too sweet to be true. It’s in the incidental details, though, that Wells’s very real talent shines most brightly. If you sing Go West at a Gay Pride Festival in Hull, ponders busker Geoff, are you actually encouraging people to go to Manchester?